Rating | Microsoft Security Response Center

Prioritizing the deployment of the April security bulletins

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

We just released eight security bulletins, five of which are rated Critical on at least one platform. We built a reference table of bulletin severity rating, exploitability index rating, and attack vectors. This table is sorted first by bulletin severity, next by exploitability index rating, and then by bulletin number. We hope it helps you choose an order of bulletins to start your prioritization and testing if you can’t deploy them all out immediately.

MS09-001: Prioritizing the deployment of the SMB bulletin

Friday, January 09, 2009

This month we released an update for SMB that addresses three vulnerabilities. This blog post provides additional information that might help prioritize the deployment of this update, and help explain the risk for code execution. In the bulletin you will see that the cumulative severity rating is Critical for Windows 2000, XP and Server 2003 systems, while Vista and Server 2008 have cumulative severity ratings of Moderate.

MS08-068: SMB credential reflection defense

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Today Microsoft released a security update, MS08-068, which addresses an NTLM reflection vulnerability in the SMB protocol. The vulnerability is rated Important on most operating systems, except Vista and Windows Server 2008 where it has a rating of Moderate. This blog post is intended to explain why the issue is less severe on Vista and Windows Server 2008, and provide some additional details to help people determine the risk they face in their environment.

Bulletin severity for October bulletins

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Bulletin severity is an interesting topic to many blog readers. We often hear that you think a bulletin should be rated higher or lower. Sometimes we even hear one person suggesting a higher rating and another suggesting a lower rating for the same issue. J This post is not to advocate for or against the MSRC rating system but we’d just like you to understand what we were thinking for each bulletin.

MS08-055: Microsoft security response process, behind the scenes

Tuesday, September 09, 2008

One of our blogging goals is to give you a peek “behind the scenes” into our security response process. We thought you might be interested in the story behind MS08-055, this month’s OneNote bulletin. In March, a security researcher sent in a report of an information disclosure vulnerability that affected OneNote 2007, a part of Office 2007.

MS08-049 : When kind of authentication is needed?

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

MS08-049 is an update for the Windows Event System service to correct an authenticated elevation-of-privilege vulnerability. We received a question via email yesterday about the type of authentication needed to exploit CVE-2008-1456. Our security bulletin was a little ambiguous with one reference to “logon credentials” and another to “domain credentials”. The email question was from an IT security manager who wondered whether his hardened servers could be compromised remotely.

MS08-023: Same bug, four different security bulletin ratings

Wednesday, April 09, 2008

Security bulletin MS08-023 addressed two ActiveX control vulnerabilities, one in a Visual Studio ActiveX control and another in a Yahoo!’s Music Jukebox ActiveX control. The security update sets the killbit for both controls. For more about how the killbit works, see the excellent three-part series (1, 2, 3) from early February in this blog.

MS08-001 - The case of the Moderate, Important, and Critical network vulnerabilities

Tuesday, January 08, 2008

Security bulletin MS08-001 addresses vulnerabilities described by two separate CVE numbers, as you can see in the bulletin. This post provides an overview of the two issues, the affected platforms and notes on the severity. We’ll be following this post up with two further entries that look at each issue in more detail.